Lightening Up on Remakes

It's odd, but it took what may be the worst idea for a movie remake ever to convince me that remaking a movie that was entertaining in the first place isn't necessarily blasphemy. It may be a bad idea, but it's not blasphemy.

The powers that be at MTV have decided to remake "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". Talk about a movie that doesn't need a remake! If you try to improve it, you'll almost certainly fail to achieve the campy quality that made it a success in the first place. If you merely try to duplicate it, what's the point? Sometimes the gods just smile upon a particular combination of talent and circumstances and an amazing thing happens. You can't recreate it, so why try? Why not just do something else? The reasons are usually financial rather than creative, and that's just a fact of life, because movies are expensive to make.

At the end of the day, the original film is still there. It doesn't go away because someone does a remake, good or bad. Stage plays are effectively "remade" all of the time in revivals with different casts and directors trying to do their own take on a play that's been performed dozens of different ways, and somehow the world keeps turning when a bad version happens. New versions of old songs are recorded. And occasionally, there are good remakes, or at least remakes that suit some tastes better than others. John Carpenter's version of "The Thing" comes to mind.

And so we might just have to deal with Luke Perry as Doctor Frankenfurter, Britney Spears as Magenta, and Lindsay Lohan as Janet, and life will go on. I might even watch the remake if it's on TV, if only out of curiosity.